I forbid any voice
but mine to be obeyed."

"_Throw_ him in," sternly repeated Wilder.

Amid the bustle and exertion of bracing round the yards, the resistance of
the pilot produced little or no sensation. He was soon raised on the
extended arms of the two mates; and, after exhibiting his limbs in sundry
contortions in the air, he was dropped into the boat, with as little
ceremony as though he had been a billet of wood. The end of the painter
was cast after him; and then the discomfited guide was left, with singular
indifference, to his own meditations.

In the mean time, the order of Wilder had been executed. Those vast sheets
of canvas which, a moment before, had been either fluttering in the air,
or were bellying inward or outward, as they touched or filled, as it is
technically called, were now all pressing against their respective masts,
impelling the vessel to retrace her mistaken path. The manoeuvre required
the utmost attention, and the nicest delicacy in its direction. But her
young Commander proved himself, in every particular, competent to his
task. Here, a sail was lifted; there, another was brought with a flatter
surface to the air; now, the lighter canvas was spread; and now it
disappeared, like thin vapour suddenly dispelled by the sun. The voice of
Wilder, throughout, though calm, was breathing with authority. The ship
itself seemed, like an animated being, conscious that her destinies were
reposed in different, and more intelligent, hands than before. Obedient to
the new impulse they had received the immense cloud of canvas, with all
its tall forest of spars and rigging, rolled to and fro; and then, having
overcome the state of comparative rest in which it had been lying, the
vessel heavily yielded to the pressure, and began to recede.

Throughout the whole of the time necessary to extricate the "Caroline,"
the attention of Wilder was divided between his own ship and his
inexplicable neighbour. Not a sound was heard to issue from the imposing
and death-like stillness of the latter. Not a single anxious countenance,
not even one lurking eye, was to be detected, at any of the numerous
outlets by which the inmates of an armed vessel can look abroad upon the
deep. The seaman on the yard continued his labour, like a man unconscious
of any thing but his own existence. There however, a slow, though nearly
imperceptible, motion in the ship itself, which was apparently made, like
the lazy movement of a slumbe